THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES
GENERAL EDITOR: B. C. SOUTHAM, M.A., B.LITT. (OXON)
Formerly Department of English, Westfield College,
University of London
The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the forma-tion of critical attitudes to the writer’s work and its place within a literary
tradition.
The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published
documentary material, such as letters and diaries.
Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer’s
death.
WILLIAM
WORDSWORTH
THE CRIT IC AL HERITAGE
Volume I 1793–1820
Edited by
ROBERT WOOF
First published 2001 by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Compilation, introduction, notes © 2001 Robert Woof All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data William Wordsworth / [compiled by] Robert Woof.
p. cm. – (Critical heritage series) Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Woof, Robert. II. Series.
PR5888 .W44 2001
821′.7 – dc21 00–045941
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
ISBN 0-203-16902-6 Master e-book ISBN
General Editor’s Preface
The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of litera-ture. On the one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writer’s historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading public, and his response to these pressures.
The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage series present a record of this early criticism. In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of the author’s reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes make available much material that would otherwise be difficult of access and present-day readers will be in a position to arrive at an informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged.
Dr Woof ’sfirstWordsworth volume, running from the earliest reviews of 1793 to The River Duddon volume of 1820, treats a vast body of criticism, including journal reviews, satires, parodies and imitations, together with fugitive comments in private letters and journals, some of which material has not been seen in print before.
The strict chronological arrangement of the material, together with Dr Woof ’s illuminating Introduction and the extensive headnotes, provide us with an invaluable perspective on Wordsworth’s towering presence amongst his contemporaries and enable us to follow the stages of his poetic growth and change over the years.
Contents
Acknowledgements xix
Abbreviations and Note on References xx
Introduction with Select Bibliography 1
I EARLY NOTICES AND OPINIONS, 1793–1801
Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk 17 1 dorothy wordsworth, letter, 1793 17 2 Unsigned review, Analytical Review, 1793 18 3 Unsigned review, Critical Review, 1793 20 4 Unsigned review, Critical Review, 1793 21 5 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1793 22 6 thomas holcroft,Monthly Review, 1793 23 7 christopher wordsworth, diary, 1793 26
8 Unsigned notice, English Review, 1793 27
9 Review signed ‘Peregrinator’,Gentleman’s Magazine, 1794 28 10 Unsigned notice, New Annual Register 1793, 1794 30 11 samuel taylor coleridge, note to poem, 1795/6 31 12 anna seward, letter, 1798 32 13 james plumptre, diary, 1799 33
‘The Birth of Love’ 33
14 francis wrangham, letter, 1795 33
‘Salisbury Plain’ 34
15 azariah pinney, letters, 1796 34 16 charles lamb, letter, 1796 36 17 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1796–1798 36
‘The Borderers’ 38
20 edward ferguson, letter, 1798 39 21 elizabeth rawson (néethrelkeld), letter, 1798 40 22 samuel taylor coleridge, letter, 1798 41 23 william hazlitt, reminiscences, 1798/1823 41 24 thomasina dennis, letter, 1798 44 25 charles lloyd, letter, 1798 46
‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’ 48
26 charles lamb, letter, 1797 48 27 thomas wedgwood, letter, 1797 49 28 elizabeth rawson (néethrelkeld), letter, 1799 49 29 joanna hutchinson, letter, 1799 50 30 samuel taylor coleridge, letter, 1800 50 31 james losh, diary, 1798–1801 51
II LYRIC AL BALLADS: OPINIONS, NOVEMBER 1798–JULY 1800
Lyrical Ballads 55
32 christopher wordsworth, letter, 1798 55 33 charles lamb, letter, 1798 55 34 thomas denman, letter, 1798 56 35 robert southey, letter, 1798 57 36 hannah more, comments recalled by Joseph Cottle,
1798/1847 57
37 sara coleridge, letter, 1799 58 38 francis jeffrey, letter, 1799 58 39 robert southey, letter, 1799 58 40 mary spedding, letter, 1799 59 41 henry crabb robinson, résumé of 1799 60 42 robert southey, letter, 1800 60 43 samuel taylor coleridge, letter, 1800 60
‘There was a boy’ 61
44 samuel taylor coleridge, letter, 1799 61
‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ 62
III LYRIC AL BALLADS: REVIEWS, OCTOBER 1798–APRIL 1800
46 Unsigned review, Monthly Mirror, 1798 65 47 robert southey, unsigned review, Critical Review, 1798 65 48 Unsigned review, Analytical Review, 1798 68 49 Unsigned notice, Monthly Magazine, 1799 69 50 Unsigned notice, New Annual Register 1798, 1799 70 51 Unsigned review, New London Review, 1799 70 52 charles burney, unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1799 74 53 Unsigned review, British Critic, 1799 78 54 Unsigned review, Naval Chronicle, 1799 82 54a alexander thomson, The British Parnassus at the Close of
the Eighteenth Century, 1801 83
55 w. heath, unsigned notice, Anti-Jacobin Review, 1800 84 56 daniel stuart, reviews & comments, Morning Post &
Courier, 1800 84
IV LYRIC AL BALLADS: OPINIONS, AUGUST 1800–FEBRUARY 1801
57 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1800–1801 89 58 charles lloyd, letters, 1801 91 59 thomas clarkson and catherine clarkson, letters and
writings, 1800–1806 92
60 john wordsworth, letters, 1801 95 61 charles lamb, letters, 1801 99 62 christopher wordsworth, letters, 1801 102 63 thomas manning, letters, 1801 103 64 william wordsworth, letter, 1801 104 65 joanna hutchinson, letter, 1801 105 66 charles james fox, letter, 1801 106 67 george bellas greenough, diary, 1801 106 68 dorothy wordsworth, Journal, 1801 107 69 robert southey, letters, 1801–1802 107 70 john wilson (‘Christopher North’), letter, 1802 108 71 dr alexander carlyle, letter, c. 1802 114 72 richard warner,Tour through the Northern Counties of
England, 1802 115
73 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1802 116 74 thomas twining, letter, 1802 119
75 fanny allen, reminiscence by her niece, 1802 119 76 robert southey, letters, 1802–1803 120 77 thomas de quincey, letters, 1803–1804 121 78 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1803–1804 124 79 sir george beaumont, letters, 1803–1806 126 80 john rickman, letter, 1804 127 81 francis jeffrey and francis horner, exchange, 1804 127 82 anna seward, letter, 1806 129 83 joseph farington, diary, 1806 129
V LYRIC AL BALLADS: REVIEWS, FEBRUARY 1801–APRIL 1804
84 john stoddart, letter and unsigned review, 1801 137 85 Editorial notice, British Critic, 1801 143 86 Unsigned review, Monthly Mirror, 1801 144 87 Unsigned notice, Monthly Review, 1802 145
88 American notices, 1799–1810 146
89 francis jeffrey, unsigned review of Southey’sThalaba,
Edinburgh Review, 1802 153
90 daniel stuart, notices, Morning Post, 1803 159 91 Unsigned review of Remarks on Scotland by John Stoddart,
Anti-Jacobin Review, 1803 160
92 ‘T. N.’, essay, Edinburgh Magazine, 1803 160 93 robert southey (with wordsworth and coleridge),
unsigned review of Poems by Peter Bayley, Annual Review
1803, 1804 161
VI POEMS, 1807: REVIEWS, 1807–1811
94 byron, unsigned review, Monthly Literary Recreations, 1807 169 95 Unsigned review, Critical Review, 1807 170 96 Unsigned review, Records of Literature, 1807 176 97 Unsigned review, Le Beau Monde, or Literary and Fashionable
Magazine, 1807 177
98 francis jeffrey, unsigned review, Edinburgh Review, 1807 185 99 Unsigned review, Satirist or Monthly Meteor, 1807 201 100 james montgomery, letter, unsigned review, memoir and
reminiscence, 1807–1812 205
101 lucy aikin, unsigned review, Annual Review, 1807 215 102 Unsigned review, The Cabinet, or Monthly Review of Polite
Literature, 1808 222
103 francis jeffrey, unsigned review of Crabb’sPoems,
Edinburgh Review, 1808 224
104 Unsigned notice, British Critic, 1809 230 105 Unsigned notice, Poetical Register and Repository for Fugitive
Poetry, 1807, 1811 231
VII POEMS, 1807: OPINIONS, 1806–1814
106 walter scott, letters, 1806–1808 235 107 robert southey, letters, 1807 236 108 john taylor coleridge, letters, a review and
reminiscences, 1807–1846 237
109 Wordsworth answers his critics, letters, 1807–1808 245 110 mrs a. b. skepper, letter, 1807 249 111 anna seward, letters, 1807–1808 250 112 Some painters’ opinions. Diaries, letters and writings,
1807–1814 252
113 elizabeth vassal fox,lady holland, journal and letter,
1807 257
114 r. p. gillies, reminiscence, 1807 258 115 thomas wilkinson, letter, 1808 259 116 joanna baillie, letters, 1808–1820 260 117 robert morehead,Poetical Epistle, 1808/1813 261 118 ? richard mant,The Simpliciad, 1808 262 119 samuel taylor coleridge,The Friend, 1809–1810 284 120 john wilson and alexander blair,The Friend, 1809 287 121 byron, reviews, comments and correspondence,
1807–1814 288
122 Unsigned lampoon, Satirist or Monthly Meteor, 1809 293 123 walter scott, unsigned essay, Edinburgh Annual Register
for 1808, 1810 294
124 john rickman, letter, 1810 299 125 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1811 299 126 charles lamb, letter, 1810 300 127 james losh, diary, 1810–1821 300
128 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1811–1814 302 129 percy bysshe shelley, letter, 1811 319 130 Anon., Modern Poets. A Dialogue, in Verse, 1813 319 131 william godwin, letter, 1811 320 132 francis jeffrey, unsigned reviews, Edinburgh Review,
1811–1812 321
133 rev. francis hodgson,Leaves of Laurel, 1813 327 134 leigh hunt, writings, 1811–1815 328 135 thomas barnes, essay signed ‘Strada’,Champion, 1814 340 136 j. h. reynolds, letter and The Eden of Imagination, 1814 345
VIII CONVENTION OF CINTRA: REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1809–1833
137 joseph farington, diary, 1809 351 138 james montgomery, unsigned review, Eclectic Review, 1809 353 139 Unsigned review, British Critic, 1809 355 140 samuel taylor coleridge,The Friend, 1809 357 141 henry crabb robinson, unsigned essay, London Review,
1809 358
142 robert southey, letter, 1810 360 143 george canning, remark, 1825 360 144 samuel taylor coleridge,Table Talk, 1833 361
IX THE EXCURSION: REVIEWS, 1814–1820
145 Unsigned notice, Variety, 1814 365
146 Unsigned notice, New Monthly Magazine, 1814 365 147 william hazlitt, unsigned review, Examinier, 1814 366 148 francis jeffrey, unsigned review, Edinburgh Review,
1814 381
149 charles lamb, unsigned review, Quarterly Review, 1814 404 150 james montgomery, unsigned review, Eclectic Magazine,
1815 416
151 Unsigned notice, Monthly Magazine, 1815 437 152 john herman merivale, unsigned review, Monthly
Review, 1815 437
153 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic,
1815 443
154 Unsigned notice, La Belle Assemblée; or, Bell’s Court and
Fashionable Magazine, 1815 457
155 charles abraham elton, unsigned review, British Review
and London Critical Jourrnal, 1815 458
156 Unsigned review, The Philanthropist or Repository for Hints and Suggestions Calculated to Promote the Happiness of Man, 1815 469 157 Unsigned notice, Literary Gazette, 1820 484
X THE EXCURSION: SOME OPINIONS, 1812–1818
158 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1812 489 159 robert southey, letters, 1814–1816 490 160 thomas poole, letter, 1814 492 161 charles lamb, letter, 1814 492 162 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1814–1815 493 163 william cookson, letter, 1814 497 164 william taylor, letters, 1814–1815 498 165 mary shelley and percy bysshe shelley, journal, sonnet
and reminiscence, 1814–1816 499
166 catherine clarkson, letter, 1814 501 167 francis horner, letter, 1815 502 168 thomas babington macaulay, letter, 1815 503 169 william johnson fox, letter, 1815 504 170 sir george and lady beaumont, letters, 1814–1818 505 171 r. p. gillies, letters, 1815–1816 509 172 dorothy wordsworth, letter, 1815 510 173 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1815 511 174 john edwards, letters, 1814–1817 514 175 priscilla wordsworth, letter, 1815 516
XI POEMS, 1815 and THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE:
REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1808–1820
176 samuel taylor coleridge, letter, 1808 519 177 Unsigned review, Theatrical Inquisitor, 1815 521 178 john scott, review signed ‘S*’,Champion, 1815 522
179 Unsigned review, British Lady’s Magazine, 1815 528 180 Unsigned notice, New Monthly Magazine, 1815 531 181 Unsigned review, Augustan Review, 1815 531 182 francis jeffrey, unsigned review, Edinburgh Review, 1815 539 183 bernard barton, letter and poem, 1815 548 184 Unsigned review, British Review, 1815 551 185 Unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1815 557 186 Unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1815 567 187 Unsigned review, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1815 568 188 josiah conder, unsigned review, Eclectic Review, 1816 569 189 rev. william rowe lyall, unsigned review, Quarterly Review,
1815 577
190 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1816 591 191 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1816 592 192 mrs basil montagu, letters, 1819–1820 593
XII LET TER TO A FRIEND OF ROBERT BURNS: REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1816–1817
193 james gray, letter, 1815 597 194 charles lamb, letter, 1816 599 195 r. p. gillies, letter, 1816 600 196 Unsigned review, Critical Review, 1816 600 197 Unsigned review, Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary
Miscellany, 1816 603
198 john wilson, letters, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,
1817 607
198a william hazlitt 614
XIII ‘THANKSGIVING ODE’: REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1816–1817
199 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1816 617 200 john scott, letter, 1816 617 201 josiah conder, unsigned review, Eclectic Review, 1816 619 202 Unsigned review, British Critic, 1816 623 203 john scott, unsigned review, Champion, 1816 623 204 Unsigned review, Dublin Examiner, 1816 630 205 Unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1817 636
XIV ‘PETER BELL’ AND ‘THE WAGGONER’: REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1819
‘Peter Bell’ 641
206 charles lamb, letter, 1819 641 207 Unsigned review, Literary Gazette, 1819 641 208 leigh hunt, unsigned review, Examiner, 1819 651 209 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1819 655 210 Unsigned notice, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1819 655 211 Review signed ‘J. B.’,European Magazine, 1819 656 212 Unsigned reviews, Theatrical Inquisitor and Monthly Mirror,
1819 661
213 Unsigned review, Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review,
1819 668
214 Unsigned notice, Monthly Magazine, 1819 669 215 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic,
1819 669
216 Unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1819 687 217 Review signed ‘H. St. John’,Kaleidoscope, or Literary and
Scientific Mirror, 1821 689
‘Peter Bell’ and ‘The Waggoner’ 695
218 josiah conder, unsigned review, Eclectic Review, 1819 695 219 Unsigned review, Literary and Statistical Magazine for
Scotland, 1819 705
220 juliet smith, letter, 1819 708 221 Unsigned review, Edinburgh Monthly Review, 1819 708
‘The Waggoner’ 713
222 charles lamb, letter, 1819 713 223 Unsigned review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1819 714 224 Unsigned review, Literary Gazette, 1819 715 225 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1819 722 226 Unsigned review, General Review or Weekly Literary
Epitome, 1819 726
227 Unsigned review, Theatrical Inquisitor and Monthly Mirror,
1819 728
228 Unsigned notice, Monthly Magazine, 1819 730 229 Unsigned notice, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1819 730
230 Unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1819 731 231 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic,
1819 734
XV ‘THE RIVER DUDDON’: REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1820–1821
232 charles lamb, letter, 1820 751 233 Unsigned review, Literary Gazette, 1820 751 234 Unsigned review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1820 755 235 Unsigned review, London Magazine, 1820 759 236 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1820 764 237 Unsigned review, Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review,
1820 767
238 Unsigned notice, Ladies Monthly Museum, 1820 769 239 Unsigned review, Eclectic Review,1820 770 240 Unsigned review, Literary and Statistical Magazine for
Scotland, 1820 776
241 Unsigned review, British Review, 1820 777 242 Unsigned notice, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1820 787 243 Unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1820 788 244 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic,
1821 794
XVI LATER OPINIONS, 1815–1820
245 charles lamb, letters, 1815 815 246 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1815 819 247 robert southey, letter, 1815 822 248 william lisle bowles, ‘The Two Sailors’, 1815 822 249 thomas wilkinson, letter, 1815 823 250 walter savage landor, letters, 1815–1822 824 251 mary barker,Lines Addressed to a Noble Lord, 1815 828 252 mary bryan, a Dedication to Wordsworth, 1815 829 253 john gibson lockhart, letters and essays, 1815–1821 832 254 mary russell mitford, letters, 1815–1819 842 255 thomas noon talfourd, writings, 1815–1835 844 256 william hazlitt, writings, 1815–1818 879 257 byron, letters and writings, 1815–1821 896
258 benjamin robert haydon, letters and diary, 1815–1817 911 259 leigh hunt, letters and writings, 1814–1818 922 260 john hamilton reynolds, letters and writings,
1815–1816 931
261 samuel rogers, letter, 1816 948 262 james hogg,Poetic Mirror, 1816 950 263 john keats, letters and writings 1817–1819 972 264 sarah wedgwood, letter, 1817 982 265 william whewell, letters, 1817–1822 983 266 percy bysshe shelley, letters and writings, 1817–1822 986 267 j. w. croker, letter, 1818 995 268 peter george patmore, writings, 1818–1823 995 269 john wilson, writings, 1818–1819 997 270 william howison, writings, 1818 1010 271 robert morehead, ‘Observations on the Poetical
Character of Dante’, 1818 1019
272 c. h. terrot,Common Sense, 1819 1022 273 robert southey, letters, 1819 1023 274 Unsigned biographical account, New Monthly Magazine,
1819 1025
275 george ticknor, journals, 1819–1837 1031 276 richard henry dana,sr., review of Hazlitt’sLectures on
the English Poets,North-American Review, 1819 1033 277 hans busk, letters, 1819–1820 1037 278 sir george beaumont, letter, 1819 1041 279 john scott, unsigned review, London Magazine, 1820 1042 280 thomas samuel mulock, report of a meeting, 1820 1057 281 the etonians: W. M. Praed and H. N. Coleridge,
Etonian, 1820 1060
Index 1068
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the many librarians over many years who have given me access to their collections, both of periodicals and of archives. The biggest debts are to the British Library and to the Wordsworth Library, but, as will be evident from the sources cited, private owners were always generous. I would like to acknowledge the assistance I received from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Leverhulme Trust in making research possible over the years.
Abbreviations and Note on References
Abbreviations have been kept to a minimum. Whenever possible, full references are given with each of the extracts.
Wordsworth’s texts are difficult to cite. There has been no complete edition of his poems since the work of Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire in the mid-twentieth century. The admirable Cornell’s
Wordsworth, general editor Stephen Parrish, will be the basis of a future edition.
After the name of the poem, the reader is referred to the de Selincourt/Darbishire text. Because the revisions are particularly radical in Wordsworth’s early work, such as Lyrical Ballads, 1798 and 1800, and
Poems 1807, additional references are given to those volumes.
LB (1798)&
LB (1800)
Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge. The text of the 1798 edition with the additional 1800 poems and the Prefaces edited with introduction, notes and appendices, R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London, Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1963).
Poems 1807 Wordsworth: Poems in Two Volumes, 1807, ed. Helen Darbishire (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1914).
PW The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, volumes I–V, 1940–9. Second edition (of Vols. I–III), ed. Helen Darbishire, 1952–4).
PW, I Volume I, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 1940, revised by Helen Darbishire, 1952.
PW, II Volume II, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 1944, revised by Helen Darbishire, 1952.
PW, III Volume III, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 1946, revised by Helen Darbishire, 1954.
PW, IV Volume IV, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 1947.
Introduction with Select Bibliography
‘He strides on so far before you he dwindles in the distance.’
This was Coleridge’s explanation for the failure of intelligent men, in this case his patron, Tom Wedgwood, and the Whig and one-time radical, James Mackintosh, to recognise Wordsworth’s power. It was Coleridge who enunciated the principle (one also shared by Words-worth) which later defended Wordsworth from the attacks of his earliest critics: ‘every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.’ Much of our understanding of Wordsworth springs from Coleridge, but, perhaps to a surprising extent, it depends also on what Wordsworth himself has told us about his art. His prefaces and essays, his letters, his dictated notes, records of his conversation, his sister Dorothy’s Journals, have all been potent in elucidating the nature of his poetry: of course, intentions are no substitute for great poetry, but if the poet is indeed as great as Wordsworth was, his insights about his own work cannot be ignored.
Yet it is still a valid question whether or not Wordsworth’s published writings about his verse were a help or a hindrance to the growth of his reputation during his lifetime. The seminal Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800, has insights which scholars and poets still delight to debate, and Wordsworth himself came to see that it was sometimes difficult for his contemporaries to understand his new emphasis on a poetry that was true to the very nuance of human feelings. About Coleridge’s remark in theBiographia Literaria, 1817, that the theory had been the first object of the critics’ attack and had got in the way of the poetry, he commented wryly:
where he pressed the thing upon me, & but for that it would never have been thought of.
(Marginalia in Barron Field’sMemoirs of Wordsworth, 1839, ed. Geoffrey Little, Sidney, 1975, 62)
There is truth in the notion that some critics did see the Preface as a stick with which to beat the poet – not, one notes, immediately after publica-tion but over the next few years, when it had settled, after revisions in 1802 and 1805, upon its revolutionary foundations. Indeed, there were few immediate reviews of Lyrical Ballads with its Preface (1800); the edition was generally regarded as a re-issue of the 1798 volume, an old publication.
In these early years there was a special vital audience which nurtured Wordsworth – a fit audience but few – which consisted of his family – Dorothy and Christopher in particular, but also his sailor-brother John with his future wife Mary and her sister Sara Hutchinson adding their voices. There was also Elizabeth Threlkeld, later Elizabeth Rawson, whose letters through fragmentary comments show how the Words-worth cousins were taking a warm interest. And then, outside the immediate family, was the acquired ‘family’ – friends such as the young Pinneys, sons of a Bristol sugar merchant; Francis Wrangham, Words-worth’s co-author in an imitation of Juvenal’s Eighth Satire; Basil Montagu, whose child Wordsworth and Dorothy looked after. By 1797/ 8, the Bristol circle had enlarged to include some who were better known to Coleridge than to Wordsworth – Joseph Cottle, Thomas Poole, James Tobin, John Estlin and James Losh and his clerical friend, Richard Warner, who were settled at Bath, the former suffering from ill health. Losh in 1798 lent his fellow Cumbrian his cottage at Shirehampton and not only sent Wordsworth new books but was one of the earliest to listen to Wordsworth reading his new poems aloud. John Thelwall was a more notorious figure, whose retirement to the Wye Valley, by way of a visit to Alfoxden in 1797, simply reminds us of the network of support Words-worth and Coleridge possessed. Thelwall was a weakish poet, and only with exaggeration could he be called a fellow writer: still, his letters written from the Wye Valley in 1798 – (see Towards Tintern Abbey, Grasmere, 1998, 80–2), express sympathies for the teaching power of nature some four months before Wordsworth wrote ‘Tintern Abbey’. Even William Godwin, the radical philosopher in London, thought in 1797 of recommending the two poets to the Wedgwoods as possible researchers for a proposed education project. There were other lively figures – such as Dr Thomas Beddoes and his brilliant young assistant,
Humphry Davy; Davies Giddy, Cornish MP and patron to both Davy and Thomasina Dennis, the latter a young writer who became govern-ess to the family of the second Josiah Wedgwood; Thomas, Josiah’s philosophically-minded brother; and the Allen family who linked the Wedgwoods and Sir James Mackintosh, since the second Josiah and Mackintosh married sisters. A key London friend was Charles Lamb who, from 1797, became one of those lifetime presences, attentive to Wordsworth’s authorship through the years. A year later the young Hazlitt was to journey to Alfoxden and Nether Stowey from Shrop-shire: he was to brood for seventeen years before publishing the first of his commentaries and a further eight before he published the scintil-latingOn My First Acquaintance with Poets in Leigh Hunt’sThe Liberal, 1823. Hazlitt’s future brother-in-law, John Stoddart (the future editor of The Times, ruthlessly satirised as Doctor Slop by William Hone), was a cold-hearted Godwinian rationalist (according to Lamb) who typified one group of reviewers – lawyers who took time off their legal studies to appraise and often roast a poet. Denman, Lockhart, John Taylor Coleridge and the redoubtable Francis Jeffrey were all practising lawyers.
It was one of those lucky/unlucky chances that Wordsworth per-suaded his London friend, John Stoddart, staying at Grasmere on his way to Scotland (where he was courting Isabella Moncrieff), to review
Lyrical Ballads for the British Critic (1802). Stoddart had become (after severe initial doubts) somewhat intemperate in his advocacy of his Lake friends, both in print and in conversation, and seems to have irritated a group of young Edinburgh Whigs about to begin a new quarterly, the
Edinburgh Review: Francis Jeffrey became their leader, but the circle included Mackintosh, Sydney Smith and Francis Horner.
Wordsworth and Coleridge put on the title-page of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads the Latin motto, ‘Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuum!’, which means ‘not exactly to your taste, o lawyers’, and this carried an implicit challenge to the reviewers who were indeed lawyers hoping to gain an extra penny to their often scanty purses. They took on a review of books, often in bulk, rather as if they were taking on a brief. They were cutting, scathing and entertaining. Francis Jeffrey, whose first reaction to the anonymous 1798 Lyrical Ballads was favourable, was, from 1802, to make Wordsworth’s poetry the subject of some powerful attacks. There is a spurious reasonableness and liveliness about Jeffrey’s essays that sweep a reader on, and yet, when Jeffrey was faced with the ‘Ode: Intim-ations of Immortality’, he can only dismiss it in 1807 as ‘the most
illegible and unintelligible part of the publication’. And The Excursion in 1814 was received by Jeffrey with a contempt of celebrated proportions: ‘This will never do’; in this way Jeffrey buried in his ironic manner even the small vestiges of praise that he allowed the poem. Two years later his review of The White Doe of Rylstone began,
This we think has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume.
Jeffrey fought his way against Wordsworth by means of these essays, and such opening sentences declared the tone. Robert Southey observed that Jeffrey could not spoil the laurels of Wordsworth and Coleridge and himself, though he might mildew their corn. Whatever the effect on Southey’s corn, Wordsworth’s sales were slow, and undoubtedly Jeffrey was in some measure responsible. Southey, the weakest of the three poets, was himself perhaps one whose presence among the Lake poets veiled Wordsworth’s excellence and originality from his readers. Francis Jeffrey found that by attacking the Lake poets as a school, he could sweep all their separate faults together and so tar and ridicule their reputations. Wordsworth and Coleridge in fact were different enough, and Southey was never a serious party to their collaborations. Arguably, Wordsworth never accepted Southey as a major poet, though he did admire him as a good man and as a neighbour. Coleridge thought of Southey as a prose writer, and his late comment in Table-Talk (in manu-script but never published by him) that Southey’s poetry had as much relation to poetry as dumb-bells do to music echoes that undercurrent of distress that both Wordsworth and Coleridge always felt about South-ey’s poetry: even as early as March 1796 Wordsworth declares SouthSouth-ey’s poetry to be the work of a coxcomb.
But it is not just that Stoddart, by his extravagant praise, poisoned the water between the Lake poets and the Scottish reviewers – he probably had a positive effect and laid the basis for the more favourable appreci-ation that Wordsworth received from Walter Scott. Wordsworth’s friendship with Scott was established by William and Dorothy’s tour to Scotland in the late summer of 1803. Scott is one example of an individual reaction. Much of the commentary that follows comes from domestic or private views and these complement those in the public magazines. Unpublished letters and journals have been searched out; commentary often comes from writers who might, in the first instance, have seen Wordsworth and Coleridge as possible rivals: most of them became admirers. Indeed, most of the truly great writers of
Wordsworth’s age saw him clearly and saw him whole. Coleridge was the closest – and perhaps significantly, one must apologise that the one great work that is not included in these volumes is Coleridge’s
Biographia Literaria, 1817; this is the most systematic appreciation of Wordsworth’s work, setting it in the context of Coleridge’s own difficult philosophical move from Locke to the German transcendentalists; Wordsworth was presented in the Biographia as one who showed the organic power of the faculty of the Imagination; and Wordsworth’s position is not the less enhanced by his being placed beside only one other poet, and that is Shakespeare. Although Wordsworth’s defects are acknowledged, his quintessential originality is insisted upon. The impact of Coleridge’s commentary can be detected in the increasing interest within the universities – William Whewell, for instance, the future Master of Trinity, was forced to reconsider Wordsworth’s poetry in the light of Coleridge’s remarks. Again, Coleridge’s impact comes through members of his family, such as his nephew, the lawyer John Taylor Coleridge, and later his brilliant daughter, Sara, who was to take up her father’s torch and place Wordsworth’s pre-eminence before the reader.
Interestingly, what both Wordsworth and Coleridge especially seemed to fear was the parodist and the satirist. They were aware of the impact that William Gifford’s sniping Baviad had had in the 1790s. When Peter Bayley published in 1803 some fairly modest parodies, the poets took extreme action to try to get him attacked in the press. Parodists and satirists were, from time to time, to produce, and even orchestrate, wintry responses to Wordsworth. Clearly, some of it derived from Jeffrey’s mocking superiority, which can seem to be an attitude rather than an argument; in truth, Jeffrey’s argument from decorum had a sociological basis in that he felt that Wordsworth took up unsuitable subjects for one who had aspiration to be a great poet. Jeffrey could not stand the new sympathy for the weak, the poor, the oppressed; not for him the revo-lutionary and democratic idea that Wordsworth expressed in his letter to Charles James Fox, January 1801, when he declared that he wanted to show that ‘men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply’. Jeffrey’s attitude was to lead to Byron’sEnglish Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1808) – a work in which Byron took up the same cudgels, not because he had read Wordsworth closely, but because it was more fun to imitate Jeffrey’s and Gifford’s bravado attacks. Byron’s style here is that of an irritated superiority, touched by a sense of aristocracy, and has few fine percep-tions. Byron was aware of the opinions of his radical acquaintance, Leigh Hunt, whose Feast of Poets (first published in 1811 but frequently
revised), presented Wordsworth and his friends scornfully expelled from the Feast by Apollo himself. However, part of the turbulence that Wordsworth caused in critical circles is illustrated by Hunt’s being forced to see Wordsworth for himself, rather than through the window of Jeffrey’s mind. Thomas Barnes, the great and future editor of The
Times, had instructed Hunt (while the latter was in gaol for libelling the Prince Regent) on Wordsworth’s excellencies; thereafter, Hunt spoke more appreciatively of Wordsworth in successive editions of The Feast of Poets, 1814 and 1815. Hunt progressively revised his poem until Wordsworth was not only accepted but elevated – to Byron’s disgust – to be ‘the prince of the bards of his time’. Byron became himself the true heir to Jeffrey’s tradition, so that he not only attacked Wordsworth in imitation of Jeffrey, but brought into play his own sense of the absurdity of the Lake poets’ claims. As well as pointing out that Coleridge had taught metaphysics to the nation, and wishing that he would ‘explain his explanation’, Byron fell upon Wordsworth’sExcursion:
Wordsworth’s last quarto, by the way, is bigger Than any since the birthday of typography; A drowsy frowzy poem called the ‘Excursion,’ Writ in a manner which is my aversion.
(Don Juan, III, 845–8)
But, as Macaulay observed, ‘though always sneering at Mr Wordsworth, he [Byron] was yet, though perhaps unconsciously, the interpreter between Mr Wordsworth and the multitude. . . . What Mr Wordsworth had said like a recluse, Lord Byron said like a man of the world.’ Cer-tainly parts of the popular Childe Harold, III (1816), were a direct result of Shelley’s persuading Byron to read Wordsworth for himself; it was a temporary phase for Byron, but many readers notice the ‘plagiarisms’ from Wordsworth – low-keyed and inadequately explored as some of them are. Byron may have stolen his enemy’s clothes and, having tried them on, decided to reject them, but his very concern with Wordsworth, even to attack him, seems to have done Wordsworth no harm.
Wordsworth knew that the attackers, the parodists and the plagiarists could be useful as well as dangerous. There must have been some core of significant truth in Wordsworth’s news and advice in 1817 to his friend Samuel Rogers: ‘Why don’t you hire somebody to abuse you? . . . For myself, I begin to fear that I should soon be forgotten if it were not for my enemies’. Whether Wordsworth was exactly pleased that he should be attacked anonymously by John Hamilton Reynolds with his witty
‘Peter Bell: A Lyrical Ballad’, in 1819, is not recorded. But Reynolds was one who, some five years before, had sought Wordsworth’s approval by sending him his poems; he had received Wordsworth’s sensible criti-cisms with disappointment, and turned his real understanding of the poet to comic effect. In this he resembles James Hogg, whose Poetic
Mirror (1816) provides blank-verse tales written in the manner of The Excursion: the parodia, or imitation, is so good that the necessary bathos for comic effect is extraordinarily minimal. Shelley’sPeter Bell the Third (1819), posthumously published in 1839, is more an essay on the poet than a parody of the poem (which Shelley in Italy had only read about in Leigh Hunt’s review in the Examiner).
All the controversy about Wordsworth’s theories and his supposed application of them had sparked off a great critical debate; and the impressive thing about the criticism of Wordsworth in his own lifetime, despite the many baffled responses, is the way that the major writers rose to the challenge he presented.
Coleridge, as we have noted, was the greatest to illuminate his con-temporaries about Wordsworth’s powers: his Biographia (1817) is a treatment not only of himself but also of the nature of poetry and of Wordsworth’s work as an illustration of that theory. More, and this we are able to show in the following pages, in his letters and conversations, Coleridge worked like a secret agent to further Wordsworth’s fame. And so, too, did others, though on a different intellectual level. Lady Beaumont, the blue-stocking wife of the painter, Sir George, could embarrass her husband (and the poet) with her fervent advocacy. Henry Crabb Robinson, indefatigable diarist, though he published little, minis-tered remarkably to Wordsworth’s cause; in coach or in drawing-room, in London, the provinces or in Germany, he would draw out a copy of the poems and read aloud. Charles Lamb published a favourable review ofThe Excursion in the Quarterly Review of 1814 (alas, sadly mutilated by the editor) but he also constantly recorded a bold and detailed response to Wordsworth in his letters. William Hazlitt stands out as one of the most interesting of Wordsworth’s public advocates. He shared with Hunt (and Byron and Shelley) an aversion to Wordsworth’s later politics and had little liking for him as a man. And yet, throughout Hazlitt’s writing, there is a shrewd apprehension of the great Wordsworth, warts and all:
He sees nothing loftier than human hopes; nothing deeper than the human heart. This he probes, this he tampers with, this he poises with all its incalculable weight of thought and feeling, in his hands; and at the same time calms the
throbbing pulses of his own heart, by keeping his eye ever fixed on the face
of nature.
(from The Spirit of the Age, 1825)
So, armed with instinct, commonsense and a certain hostility, Hazlitt teases out the significance of Wordsworth, and if there is no point of rest in Hazlitt’s thinking, it is because Wordsworth cannot be dismissed or categorised; there is no magic, as Rumpelstiltskin discovered, when a thing can be precisely named. Hazlitt’s criticisms were to fall on the receptive ears of John Keats: but Keats’s intelligence is sufficiently inde-pendent and his commentary is part of a larger concern with his poetical identity. But for all the creative writers – Lamb, Walter Scott, De Quincey, Shelley, Keats, even Clare, the late Blake and the early Tennyson – Wordsworth had become one of those mountains which had to be climbed because it became increasingly impossible to go round him. This was even to be the situation of lesser poets who might be described as literary journalists: the fair-minded non-conformist James Montgomery, who was both a reviewer and a rhetorical verse-writer, and, again, the more talented but, to Wordsworth, the unreliable figure of Leigh Hunt.
There was enough written on Wordsworth’s behalf during his own lifetime to fill several feet of library shelves. Leisurely articles, long and often anonymous, appeared in periodicals by such minor writers as John Scott, the editor of the Champion and the London Magazine; Thomas
Noon Talfourd, lawyer and poet; Thomas de Quincey and John Wilson (from 1820 Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University), not to mention the growing fullness of American admiration – the painter Washington Allston, the Unitarian W. E. Channing, the young Harvard professor George Ticknor, prelude to editors such as Henry Reed; another powerful voice, as yet confined to a personal journal, was Emerson’s, who had aspirations to be a great poet. It was this massing of many recognitions that led, eventually, to Wordsworth’s becoming Poet Laureate in 1843 on the death of his neighbour, Robert Southey. The enterprising new University of Durham had, in 1838, noted that he was in the area and promptly gave him his first Honorary Doctorate, but it was one year later, on 12 June 1839, at a great reception at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, when Isabella Fenwick, the friend of his later years, and the recorder of all his own notes on his poems in the 1840s, recorded in her letters:
No such acclamations had been heard excepting on the appearance of the Duke of Wellington – these however did not much move him – but when the public
Orator spoke of him as the Poet of humanity – and as having through the power of love & genius – made us feel as nothing the artificial distinctions which
separate the different classes of society and that ‘we have all one common heart’ –
then he felt understood & recognised – & was thankful.
(Ms. Wordsworth Trust)
Robert Browning’s melancholy view of Wordsworth in ‘The Lost Leader’ (1845) owes something to the paranoid (and sometimes brilliant) comments by the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and to Elizabeth Barrett (see my essay in Benjamin Robert Haydon, Grasmere, 1996). Certainly, Browning’s view of Wordsworth contrasted with that of the ardent John Ruskin who, on the same day, was awarded the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. Browning’s dramatised portrait, for which he later apologised, has also some of its origins in what Browning discovered of Shelley’s disappointment with Wordsworth. The critiques of Browning and Shelley, both written in verse, represent one of the real difficulties for a volume concerned with this poet’s critical heritage: for when a poet has absorbed a great writer from his own or from a previous generation, the very admiration that the younger poet feels will also be tinctured by the deepest level of rivalry and criticism which affects the whole of the young poet’s work. If, for instance, one were to consider
Alastor (1816), a poem in which Shelley was becoming for the first time the master of his own voice, one would find there a wonderful presenta-tion of a Wordsworthian kind of poet, one who certainly has failed in his mission but whose failure is both honourable and heroic. Shelley famously cites Wordsworth’s own lines as an epigraph to Alastor– ‘The good die first, / And those whose hearts are dry as summer’s dust, / Burn to the socket’. [The Excursion, I, 500-2]. Shelley was rightly sceptical that an early death proved moral worth.
But the full nineteenth-century story will have to be the work of a volume other than this publication, which concludes in 1820. This avoids the massive reviews of Ecclesiastical Sonnets and Memorial of a Tour of the Continent 1820, published 1822, which assured us that Wordsworth had, with this least memorable of his poetry, found a rather drear coincidence of taste with the reviewers and reading public. Wordsworth in his later poetry became a muted spokesman for the Church of England. He had been confronted by niggling critics such as John Wilson (‘Christopher North’) or his own nephews about possible heretical touches in his notion of pre-existence in the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’. He had stiffened some of the theological and religious references in his revisions of The Prelude before its posthumous
publication, but it would seem that one of the triumphs of his poetry was that it would provide for many readers of different beliefs, as it did for Mill, a near-religious experience: the American Unitarian, W. E. Channing, used Wordsworth along with the Bible as a spiritual source. The Quakers, influenced by Thomas Clarkson’s Portraiture of
Quakerism (1806), found Wordsworth a moral teacher. John Sterling, the friend of Carlyle and of Mill, was to recommend Wordsworth’s poetry as softening the ‘dry hard spirit of modern unitarianism’. People were to catch sight of Wordsworth’s wish to show, as he had put it to Charles James Fox, ‘that men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply’; or, as he put it in ‘The Cumberland Beggar’: ‘we have all of us one human heart’. John Keble was to claim that Wordsworth, ‘whether he discoursed on man or nature, failed not to lift up the heart to holy things, tired not of maintaining the cause of the poor and simple, and so, in perilous times was raised up to be a chief minister not only of noblest poesy but of high and sacred truth . . .’. But beyond such democratic and humane senti-ments, tribute should be paid to Wordsworth’s capacity to construct a language, newly coined, whereby to express his natural theology: phrases such as ‘something far more deeply interfused’, ‘soul of all my moral being’, ‘Wisdom and spirit of the universe’, ‘Presences of nature’, or, not least, ‘The mind of man . . . married to this goodly universe’ were to have far-reaching reverberations. Religious commentators of quite different persuasions did not find Wordsworth too difficult to fit into their own organised systems of belief. Here, perhaps, lay, and still remains, Wordsworth’s importance: that somewhere along the line of people’s belief, he touches, develops, enlivens their consciousness of things as they are, and not always in expected ways. His very research into the way people live (an element emphasised by Dorothy’s Grasmere Journals, 1800–1803) marks him as a writer with a novelist’s sensibility, even though that is to name only one aspect of his poetry. His matter-of-factness is combined with a capacity to generalise, as if, out of his practice of keeping his eye on both people and nature, he earned the right to give intimations of human order; even of immortality.
At his death, the obituaries, the reviews of The Prelude (1850) and of
Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851) by his nephew, Christopher Wordsworth, politely crowded in; but no great critic emerged at this point. Most unusually, Emerson spoke of Wordsworth’s ‘oriental abstraction’, thus suggesting in a phrase Wordsworth’s massive capacity for significant meditation. Emerson indeed sent a private letter to Henry Reed who had asked for his ‘opinion of Mr. Wordsworth’s Genius’:
. . . I have been in New York two days, & there is no time in Philadelphia, I find,
for a stranger; – no time there to sit & sum his obligations to the solitariest & wisest of poets, I do not know but I must defer it altogether to a silent hour, by & by, far from cities. It is very easy to see, that to act so powerfully on this practical age, he needed, with all his oriental abstraction, the indomitable vigor rooted in animal constitution, for which country men are marked. Otherwise he could not have resisted the deluge-streams of their opinion with success. One would say, he is the only man among them who has not in any point succumbed to their ways of thinking, & has prevailed. I mean, not consciously consented, – for his Church and State, though genuine enough in him, I look upon as the limitations & not the excellence of his genius.
Rather than not write, I will send this rude note, reserving my right to com-municate a more considered ballot, as soon as I find a quiet halfhour to rejoice in
my remembrances of this old benefactor.
(Ms. The Wordsworth Library, dated 1 January 1854: see also Transactions of Wordsworth Society, 1883, V, 124.)
ButThe Prelude was largely mistaken for a repetition of The Excursion, and its appearance was muffled by the publication of In Memoriam, the work of Tennyson, the rising star, soon to be the next Poet Laureate. Wordsworth’s presence was felt by Tennyson and, interestingly, was promoted by Tennyson in helping Francis Palgrave to make a selection of Wordsworth’s lyrics in The Golden Treasury (1861): ‘You will see’, Palgrave told Christopher Wordsworth, ‘that WW. has given us more numerically & quantitively than any other poet’.
Stephen Gill’s admirable Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998) rightly points to the 1870s as the moment when Wordsworth’s reputation and achievement become the subject of serious debate. It is at this point that John Stuart Mill publishes his Autobiography (1873), an impressive per-sonal testimony to the kind of power that Wordsworth’s poetry could have, a power which Matthew Arnold had already named a healing power in his ‘Memorial Verses’, his elegy on the death of Wordsworth in 1850. Mill explains that in 1828 he had experienced ‘a crisis in my mental history’. It was then that he discovered the healing power of Wordsworth:
. . . Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had merely
placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than
any poet. What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of.
This is the account of a writer outside the Christian tradition and, indeed, the very phrase, ‘a medicine for my state of mind’, echoes a line from the madman’s speech in Shelley’sJulian and Maddalo (1. 355): gone is the context of suffering and humiliation of Shelley’s madman; in Mill’s world the medicine for his mind is the Wordsworthian world of internal feelings influenced by beauty.
Along with Mill’s Autobiography there is the subtle essay by R. H. Hutton, originally published in 1857 but collected in 1871 as ‘Words-worth and His Genius’; Walter Pater’s ‘On Words‘Words-worth’ (1874) wonder-fully presents Wordsworth’s coherence in his capacity to convey the true voice of feeling; and, differently, the sceptic Leslie Stephen, in contrast to, say, Matthew Arnold, determined to show that he could explicate ‘Wordsworth’s Ethics’, and did so in the Cornhill Magazine, 1876. Arnold was to provoke passionate responses by concluding his essay on Byron by stating that ‘Wordsworth and Byron stand out by themselves. When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her poetic glories in the century which has then just ended, the first names with her will be these.’ Swinburne, who much preferred Coleridge and Shelley, would have none of this (see ‘Wordsworth and Byron’,Nineteenth Century, 15, April and May, 1884). Alfred Austin, the future Poet Laureate, had found Wordsworth as presented by Arnold to possess little achievement as a poet, since Wordsworth ‘does not treat Great material and he totally lacks Character, Action, Invention and Situation’ (see Gill, 1998, 218).
The public discussions in the 1870s and 1880s interestingly still included the leading writers of that time: but, significantly, the new approaches of textual scholarship and of biographical research were at hand. William Knight – the first Secretary of the Wordsworth Society, founded in 1884 – later was to have his work mockingly characterised by his twentieth-century successor, Ernest de Selincourt, as ‘the reign of chaos and old night’. Yet it was William Knight, along with Ernest Dowden, who was to lay the foundations for the exacting editorial approach made possible by access to Wordsworth’s worked, and re-worked, manuscripts. Readers had to wait for Emile Legouis’The Early Life of William Wordsworth 1770–1798 (1896), nearly half a century after Wordsworth’s death, to be taught the taste by which The Prelude was to be enjoyed. Despite these explorations and several fine Victorian essays from Pater, Leslie Stephen and Matthew Arnold, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – with their great tide of interpreters, editors, historians of ideas – still reach forward, still find Wordsworth ahead.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1912), The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols, Oxford.
—— (1956–71), Collected Letters of Samuel Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols, Oxford.
—— (1969), The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols, Princeton.
—— (1983), Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and W. J. Bate, 2 vols, Princeton.
Gill, Stephen (1989), William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford. —— (1998), Wordsworth and the Victorians, Oxford.
Moorman, Mary (1965), William Wordsworth: A Biography, 2 vols, Oxford. Owen, W. J. B. (1957), ‘Costs, Sales, and Profits of Longman’s Editions of
Wordsworth’,Library, 5th ser. 12, 93–107.
Peacock, Markham L. (1950), The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth, Baltimore.
Reed, Mark (1967), Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770–1799, Cambridge, Mass.
—— (1975), Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years, 1800–1815, Cambridge, Mass.
Reiman, Donald, ed. (1972), The Romantics Reviewed. Part A: The Lake Poets, 2 vols, New York.
Smith, Elsie (1932), An Estimate of William Wordsworth by His Contemporaries 1793–1822, Oxford.
Woof, Robert (1962a), ‘Coleridge and Thomasina Dennis’,University of Toronto Quarterly, 32, 37–54.
—— (1962b), ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry and Stuart’s Newspapers: 1797–1803’, Studies in Bibliography, XV, 149–89.
—— (1970a), ‘John Stoddart, “Michael”, and Lyrical Ballads’, Ariel, University of Calgary, I, April, 7–22.
—— (1970b), ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge: Some Early Matters’,Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory of John Alban Finch, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth and B. Darlington, Ithaca, NY, 76–91.
—— (1984), ‘John and Sarah Stoddart: Friends of the Lambs’,The Charles Lamb Bulletin, January, 93–109.
—— (1986), ‘The Matter-of-Fact Paradise’,The Lake District: A Sort of National Property, ed. John Murdoch, London, 9–28.
—— (1995), ‘The Presentation of the Self in the Composition of The Prelude’, in Presenting Poetry, eds Howard Erskine-Hill and Richard A. McCabe, Cambridge.
Wordsworth, Dorothy, (1941), Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2 vols, London.
Grasmere Journals, 1800–1803, with an introduction by Helen Darbishire, ed. Mary Moorman, 2nd edn, Oxford.
—— (1991), The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof, Oxford.
Wordsworth, William, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, Oxford and London: 1895.
——The Prose of William Wordsworth, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 3 vols, London, 1876.
——The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 6 vols, Oxford, 1935–9, rev. Alan G. Hill, 8 vols., Oxford, 1967–93.
——The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols, Oxford 1941–9; rev. edn 1952–9.
——Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 1798, ed. W. J. B. Owen, 2nd edn, 1969.
——The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds W. J. B.Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols, Oxford, 1974.
——The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis, London, 1993.
I
descriptive sketches and an evening walk
overlook the dark and broad Gulph between. If you have not yet seen the Poems pray do not make known my opinion of them – let them pass the fiery ordeal.
(EY, 88–9)
EDITOR’S NOTES
1. The word, ‘moveless’, occurs in Evening Walk (1793) ll. 104 and 206 where it is ‘applied to the Swan’, and in Descriptive Sketches l. 206; ‘viewless’ occurs in Evening Walk (1793) l. 148, and in Descriptive Sketches (1793) ll. 36, 92, 227, 548, 648; in l. 36 it was changed to ‘sightless’ in 1794. These words were all removed in later editions, as were ‘breathless’, ‘shadeless’, ‘harmless’, ‘roofless’,
‘cloudless’, ‘bottomless’, ‘hopeless’, ‘weedless’, ‘pulseless’.
2. Evening Walk (1793), l. 407. The longed-for cottage retreat is seen in the distance, though ‘dark and broad the gulph of time between’ (l. 414).
2.
Unsigned review, Analytical Review, March 1793, XV, 294–7
Joseph Johnson published this periodical as well as Descriptive Sketches and Evening Walk (both 1793) and there is inevitably a touch of advertisement about the reviews. This early review was rendered doubly effective for
Wordsworth since the long extract from Descriptive Sketches was reprinted in a major provincial newspaper, the weekly supplement to the Sherborne Advertiser. The extract appeared in the Weekly Entertainer 22 (30 Septem-ber 1793), 334–5 under the heading, ‘From Descriptive Sketches of the Alps, by V. Wordsworth [sic]’, with the misprint of ‘shed’ for ‘shade’. The Analytical Review notices of the two poems are usefully placed as far as Wordsworth is concerned: they come immediately after a long review of Erasmus Darwin’s much-heralded Botanic Garden (1791), and this juxta-position might account for the fact that Wordsworth’s poems were known at this early date at Derby, the home of Darwin, and at Exeter (see Christopher Wordsworth’s diary).
a. Descriptive Sketches
Certainly nothing can be conceived better adapted to inspire sublime conceptions, and to enrich the fancy with poetical imagery, than a tour to the Alps. The present poem, as we learn from the dedication, is the result of such a tour, made by the author with a single companion on foot: and our traveller has not been an indolent spectator of the magnificent and varied scenes through which he has passed. The diversified pictures of nature which are sketched in this poem, could only have been produced by a lively imagination, furnished by actual and attentive observation with an abundant store of materials. The majestic grandeur of moun-tains, the rich and varied scenery of lakes and vallies, the solemn gloom of ruined monasteries and abbeys, and the different aspect of Alpine scenes in the morning and evening, during a storm, and in other atmospherical changes, are described with studied variety of imagery; the piece is occasionally enlivened with human figures, and the whole is rendered instructive by the frequent introduction of moral reflections. At the same time we must own, that this poem is on the whole less interesting than the subject led us to expect; owing in part, we believe, to the want of a general thread of narrative to connect the several descriptions, or of some episodical tale, to vary the impression; and in part also to a certain laboured and artificial cast of expression, which often involves the poet’s meaning in obscurity. But our readers will be best able to judge of the nature of this performance, and the degree of entertainment it is likely to afford them, from a specimen. We shall select the description of the lake of Uri, and a stormy sunset.
[Quotes Descriptive Sketches (1793), ll. 284–347: Lo! Fear looks silent down on Uri’s lake . . . The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.]
We fancy there are few readers, whose imagination will be sufficiently glowing, to bear this last image, without pronouncing it extravagant. Perhaps too, some others may be disposed to censure, as degrading the subject to which it is applied, the image of the sun ‘shaking his flashing shield from behind the clouds.’ But it will not be denied, that the scenery of the hermit’s hut is well conceived and described, and that Freedom is poetically exhibited as an allegorical person. The subject of freedom the poet afterwards resumes, in the following pleasing lines:
[Quotes Descriptive Sketches (1793), ll, 719–39:
In the wide range of many a weary round . . . And whiter is the hospital bed.]
b. Evening Walk
This descriptive poem is so nearly of the same character with the preced-ing, that it is only necessary to remark in general, that it affords distinct and circumstantial views of nature, both inanimate and animate, which discover the eye of a diligent observer, and the hand of an able copyist of nature. We give the following picturesque passage.
[Quotes Evening Walk (1793), ll. 301–28;
Sweet are the sounds that mingle from afar . . . Tune in the mountain dells their water lyres.]
3.
Unsigned review, Critical Review, July 1793, VIII, 347–8
Our northern lakes have of late years attracted the attention of the public in a variety of ways. They have been visited by the idle, described by the curious, and delineated by the artist; their beauties, however, are not exhausted, and this little poem is a proof of it. Local description is seldom without a degree of obscurity, which is here increased by a harshness both in the construction and the versification; but we are compensated by that merit which a poetical taste most values, new and picturesque imagery. There are many touches of this kind, which would not disgrace our best descriptive poets. The sun-set, an appearance so often described, has strokes perfectly new:
A long blue bar its ægis orb divides,
And breaks the spreading of its golden tides.
[Evening Walk (1793), ll. 153–4]
The heron that
Springs upward, darting his long neck before,
[Ibid., l. 308]
The char, that for the May-fly leaps, And breaks the mirror of the circling deeps,
[Ibid., ll. 311–12]
are equally happy; but we were particularly pleased with the following description of the swan:
[Quotes ibid. ll. 195, 199–218:
I love – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Along the ‘wild meand’ring shore’ to view . . . Close by her mantling wings’ embraces prest.]
The beauty of the moveless form of snow, need not be pointed out to a
lover of poetry. – The beggar, whose babes are starved to death with cold,
is affecting, though it has not equal strength with the soldier’s wife in
Langhorne’s Country Justice, which seems in some measure to have
suggested the idea.
We doubt whether atop, for on the top, is not a contraction too
bar-barous, and sugh, though an expressive word, too local to be used in any
species of elegant writing.
4.
Unsigned review, Critical Review, August 1793, VIII, 472–4
The wild, romantic scenes of Switzerland have not yet been celebrated by an English poet; and its uncultivated beauties, which of themselves inspire the most sublime and poetical ideas, which suggest the terrible graces of rude rocks, majestic waterfalls, the abrupt cleft, and the seeming tempestuous sea arrested by the torpifying power of frost into the bold glaciere, seem to have been surveyed by few of the poetic race,
——Cui mens divinior atque os Magna sonaturam.1
The objection is scarcely removed. Mr. Wordsworth has caught few sparks from these glowing scenes. His lines are often harsh and prosaic, his images ill-chosen, and his descriptions feeble and insipid.
The Introduction is almost unintelligible, or, if intelligible, conveys only a vague, seemingly an inaccurate idea.
[Quotes Descriptive Sketches (1793), ll. 1–12:
Were there, below, a spot of holy ground . . . In cataracts, or sleeps in quiet lakes.]
The following description of the Lake Como is in our author’s best style; yet it has many of the faults already mentioned:
[Quotes ibid. (1793), ll. 80–105:
More pleas’d my foot the hidden margin roves . . . As up th’ opposing hills, with tortoise foot, they creep.]
The next passage we shall select is more characteristic of the author’s general manner.
[Quotes ibid. (1793), ll. 201–14:
A giant moan along the forest swells . . . And the bridge vibrates, tottering to its fall.]
We have not room for numerous extracts, and shall therefore conclude with some lines, which possess both the merit of glowing, but incorrect description, and the harshness, which is too prevalent through the whole poem.
[Quotes ibid. (1793), ll. 317–29:
Mid stormy vapours ever driving by . . .
Strange ‘weeds’ and alpine plants her helm entwine.]
EDITOR’S NOTE
1. Horace, Satires 1.4.43–45. ‘sonaturam’ should read ‘sonaturum’: ‘who has a more divine soul and a tongue of noble utterance’.
5.
Unsigned review, European Magazine, September 1793, XXIV, 192–3 A living poetical writer has observed.
That which was formed to captivate the eye, The ear must coldly taste; description’s weak, And the Muse falters in the vain attempt.
To the truth of this remark we cannot refuse our assent, after comparing some of the best descriptions given by our greatest writers with the objects described. Perhaps of all the scenes which Great Britain can boast
